Third Time Lucky
by tutncleo
Summary: Tony finds treasures from Gibbs' past. Tony/Gibbs pairing. Part Three of the the "Home Is..." Series


"**Third Time Lucky"  
**

**"A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless." May Sarton**

"No way! We're not getting one of those. We live in a house, not a dorm room," Gibbs decreed adamantly.

Tony was lying boneless on an enormous beanbag chair in the furniture aisle at Target, looking up at Gibbs, giving him his best impression of a puppy dog, eyes wide and imploring. 'All that was missing was the wagging tail,' Gibbs thought, fighting back a smile. He couldn't afford to let Tony know he was amused, or he would use it to his own advantage.

"It's red and gold for the Redskins. We need to have it," Tony said persuasively.

"Those are the colors for the Corps, too, and still I don't feel that need," Gibbs rebutted.

"But I need a comfortable chair in the basement," Tony pleaded. "My butt gets sore sitting in that old wooden thing, hour after hour."

"No one said you had to sit down there 'hour after hour'" Gibbs said, imitating Tony's martyred tone of voice. "There are plenty of comfortable places to sit in the den, or living room," he reminded Tony.

"They're not comfortable when I'm sitting up there alone," Tony replied, "and you do spend a lot of time down with the boat, Boss," he said with an easy smile and gentle tone, not wanting Gibbs to think he resented it. In actuality, Tony loved to spend time down in the basement with Gibbs, removed from the rest of the world, content to watch him work.

"I'll get you a pillow, Tony. I don't want your ass to get bruised," he said. "At least, not that way," he smirked, and laughed outright when Tony gave a muffled squeak. 'Score one for the old guy,' he congratulated himself. "I thought you said this was going to be a quick stop, just long enough for you to pick up some DVD that just got released? You didn't mention anything about looking for things to redecorate."

"One chair, added to a room that doesn't have a decent place to sit, hardly qualifies as redecorating," Tony countered, but even as he spoke, he was standing up, knowing this battle had been lost, but privately vowing to ultimately win the war, as he headed off for the video section, Gibbs trailing along after him.

On the following Saturday, they had a repeat performance of the previous shopping excursion, this time in a Pier 1. Gibbs still couldn't believe he was even in this store, he hated shopping in general, and stores like this made him uncomfortable; but when Tony had said he was going out because he needed to pick up a couple of things for the house, Gibbs had flashed back on the beanbag chair. He had come along as a form of self protection, worried that something even more offensive than a vinyl covered bag of plastic pellets might find its way into the house. Instead of sitting on a beanbag chair, Tony was now lounging in an enormous papasan chair, its light green cushion resting on a pale rattan frame, wiggling his eyebrows and suggestively discussing how there was room for two.

"There might be room, but that cheap frame isn't going to hold both our weight. Or were you planning on sitting in it with someone else?" Gibbs inquired.

"Well, I'm sure Abby wouldn't mind snuggling," Tony said airily.

"And where are you planning on putting McGee?" Gibbs smirked, referring to the highly improbable, on again, off again relationship between his preppy, uptight agent, and the goth forensic specialist.

"Two's company," Tony said. "Three's just excessive. Probielicious will just have to stay home and work on his novel."

Gibbs rolled his eyes, not at all threatened. "Tony, there isn't enough room in the basement for this chair," Gibbs said, trying to be reasonable. He couldn't tell how serious Tony was about getting a chair for the basement, or how much this had just become a game for him, since neither of the chairs he had suggested made any sense for the space.

"Fine," Tony said. "But I hope you still like my butt when I have calluses on it."

"I'd like it even better if it was out of that chair and headed for that door," he said, pointing to the entrance to the store. Then he reached out a hand, and pulled Tony out of the papasan. Again, Tony let the subject drop, but Gibbs was sure they weren't through with it yet. But when the rest of the day passed pleasantly, without Tony bringing it up again, he began to think he had been overly suspicious.

The following week, Gibbs was to be gone from Wednesday through Saturday, attending a seminar on leadership, which he had tried, unsuccessfully, to talk Vance out of forcing him to attend. When he told Tony about it, Tony said all the appropriate words about how he would miss him, but he didn't really seem all that bothered, and Gibbs could swear he saw wheels turning in Tony's brain. Tuesday night, as he packed his bag, Tony seemed too eager to help, reaffirming for Gibbs that there was something hinky going on. Remembering the last couple of weekends, Gibbs said, "Promise me you won't go out and buy some chair for the basement while I'm gone. If you really want one, we'll find one that'll fit when I get back," surprised when Tony readily agreed.

The seminar couldn't have come at a better time for Tony. Gibbs' birthday was the next week, and Tony had spent the last month trying to figure out something special to do for him. When Gibbs told him he would be gone for three and a half days, Tony had an idea. After Tony had started spending enough time at Gibbs' to go snooping, he had been shocked the first time he had looked into the garage. Before he moved in, Gibbs' house had been the embodiment of military precision. There was nothing extraneous in it, everything in it had a function and a place, and a cleaning lady came once a week to ensure that no dust or cobwebs accumulated where they didn't belong. The bedcovers were always pulled so tightly Tony had been positive that you really could bounce a coin off of them, and nothing littered the counters in the bathroom or the kitchen. The basement had been the only exception, and Tony didn't really consider it a part of the house proper, instead seeing it as kind of magical realm that one just happened to be able to access through a door in the kitchen. The garage, on the other hand, had been the polar opposite. It was just four walls, jammed full with boxes, discarded lawn furniture and equipment, and piles of things covered in tarps that Tony had been almost afraid to explore. You couldn't really walk in there, and Tony had instantly understood why Gibbs always parked his car in the drive. When he'd asked Gibbs about it, he'd looked slightly embarrassed and said he had just let it get out of hand over the years, and that now it was going to take more time than he had to put it to rights. That was going to be Tony's gift for Gibbs. He was going to clean out the garage for him.

Work on Wednesday seemed to drag by at a crawl. Vance had assigned them to cold cases for the duration of Gibbs' absence, and the boredom, combined with his impatience to start on his project, made Tony testy. When five o'clock rolled around, it was a toss-up as to who was in a bigger hurry to leave, he or McGee. Tony stopped at one of the chain home improvement stores on his way home and purchased two sets of build-it-yourself shelving units with doors, plastic storage tubs in a variety of sizes, and four boxes of trash bags. When he got everything out to the car, he had barely been able to shove it all in, and as it was, he had needed to tie the lid to the trunk down, since it was so packed that it would not close all the way. When he got home, he made a peanut butter sandwich, too excited to get started to waste much time on eating.

By midnight, Tony had cleared a path through the center of the garage. He had eight bags of garbage, mostly consisting of boxes he had broken down, ceramic pots which had been broken by the weight of the things piled on top of them, and clothing he had found packed in some of the aforementioned boxes – astoundingly outdated and now filled with moth holes. He had organized miscellaneous Christmas and other holiday decorations, which had clearly not been touched in over a decade, into plastic tubs, carefully labeling them. Gardening tools and paint supplies had been likewise sorted, crated and labeled. He still had the outside perimeter of the garage to go, but he had made enough room to carry in the boxes of shelves that were still out in the car. Gibbs had called around ten, complaining about the stupidity of the seminar he had attended that afternoon, and unwilling to waste any time, Tony had continued to clean while talking to him. When he had to ask Tony the same question twice, Gibbs had asked him what he was doing, and Tony had said he was watching a movie, hoping that would explain why he seemed a bit distracted. Gibbs had accepted the explanation, and rang off, promising to call the next day. By the time he fell into bed at 12:15, he was exhausted, but pleased with his progress.

Tony was back in the garage by 5:30 p.m. on Thursday. The night started as a continuation of the previous evening. Tony had begun to view the whole process as a scavenger hunt, the end goal being a more complete understanding of Gibbs' past. That night he found boxes of sporting equipment, including a golf set, which undoubtedly held the seven iron wife number two had attacked him with. Another couple of boxes contained camping equipment, including a pup tent and two hiking backpacks. When Tony got to the box containing an ancient VCR player and tapes, many of which were children's movies, he had known immediately how long that box had been out there. Tony had gotten up from where he had been crouching, suddenly needing to take a break. He thought he had prepared himself for the likelihood of finding some evidence of Shannon and Kelly, but the reality was harder to deal with. He wasn't jealous of them; both he and Gibbs had pasts. It was the empathic pain he felt for the sorrow their memory caused Gibbs that made him back away. It wasn't as if he and Gibbs sat around discussing their feelings, far from it, but on the rare occasions when Gibbs' late family were mentioned, he had been able to sense Gibbs slamming down his emotions, needing to create a barrier between himself and their ghosts. As Tony went into the kitchen to get a soda, he wondered if he had just discovered the reason Gibbs had let the garage get so out of control. Would he find other boxes containing items Gibbs had not been able to discard, but could not bear to look at? As he drank his coke an even bigger question occurred to him. What was he going to do with them, if they existed? Tony knew he had to get through everything that night. The next morning was garbage pick-up day, and he wanted all the trash bagged and gone, so it wouldn't be the first thing Gibb saw when he returned Saturday night. Steeling himself, he went back to the garage.

By the time he was done sorting through all the clutter, he had found four more boxes that contained items that had once belonged to Shannon or Kelly. There were two boxes with books in them, one a collection of various children's stories and the other a mix of fantasy and romance novels. The other two were a hodgepodge of items, stuffed animals, jewelry, toys, clothing, and a collection of letters, all sent from overseas to either Shannon or Kelly, and bound together with a faded yellow ribbon. Tony didn't read them, it wasn't his place, but he knew they were from Gibbs, collected and preserved with love, by Shannon. He placed these items to the side, along with the VCR player and tapes, deciding to deal with them the next day, and continued sorting through the more mundane items in the garage.  
At the end of the night, he had over twenty bags of garbage, which he hauled out, two at a time, to the curb. In the garage, plastic boxes, neatly labeled, were stacked bottom upon lid, in four neat piles; larger gardening tools, such as hoes and shovels had been organized against one wall, next to a collection of snow shovels and ladders. The boxes with the shelving units in them lay on the ground, just waiting to be constructed. In the middle of the garage sat the item Tony was most excited about discovering, an old brown upholstered rocking chair, which he had found shoved in the far back corner, covered by a tarp. It wasn't beautiful - the fabric frayed along the edges in places, and the seat cushion sagged a bit from use – but it was comfortable and a good size. When Tony had sat in it the first time, he'd felt a little like Goldilocks, when she discovered Baby Bear's chair. Although he had refrained from announcing it 'Just right!' he had immediately thought about how well it would work in the basement. Deciding to wait until tomorrow to build the shelves, he grabbed the chair and began to lug it into the house.

It was a good thing that Tony was a large man, and strong. The chair, while not really oversized, was heavy, suggesting a solid wood frame, and the runners at the bottom made it difficult to maneuver. It took quite a bit off manipulation to wrestle it down the stairs, but once he got in into the basement, he was inordinately pleased. It seemed to fit right in, looking as if it had always been there. The old fashioned shape worked perfectly in a space where power equipment had been shunned, in favor of a variety of new and ancient hand tools. The brown of the upholstery fit in well with the wood and muted colors of the space, not upstaging the central focus of the room - the wooden frame of Gibbs' boat. Its size enabled Tony to snuggle it into the corner, between the workbench and the stairs, out of the way, but positioned so that an occupant would have a view of the entire basement. Worn out from the day's activities, he sank into the chair, content to just rock while gazing at the boat, amazed at how well the chair seemed to fit his body. He hadn't been there long, before he drifted off to sleep, the old soft fabric of the chair cocooning him in its warmth. When he woke up, he was momentarily disoriented. A quick look around helped him get his bearings, and a glance at his watch told him it was 6:00 a.m. He stretched as he stood, surprised to discover he wasn't stiff after a night spent in a chair, and went upstairs to get ready for work.

Again the work day seemed as though it would never end. Gibbs was apparently equally as bored at his seminar, because he called repeatedly, under the pretense of wanting updates on what Tony and McGee were accomplishing, but not really seeming all that interested in the results of their reviews of the old cases. He sniped about the speakers and the hotel, and seemed most offended over the lack of decent coffee. By his last call he had started in on a game whereby he asked Tony all sorts of intimate and suggestive questions that he knew Tony couldn't really answer while in the bullpen, forcing Tony to answer with oblique phrases and one word comments, which only added to the frustration of the day for Tony. Tony was glad when the day ended, and he could finally leave.

It took Tony several hours to construct the cabinets, despite the detailed instructions he found in the boxes. He wasn't used to doing this sort of work, and he was glad for the various tools he had found in the garage while cleaning. By 9:00, they were built, and Tony wrestled them against the far wall, lining them up in a neat row. He then began to organize the tubs he had prepared over the last two days, stacking them on the shelves of the cabinets in a logical order - boxes of gardening tools sitting next to boxes of pots and coiled hoses, tools next to a collection of screws, nails and other hardware, spray paints, organized by type and color placed next to a tub of brushes - the neatly printed labels for each tub facing out and clearly visible. Finally, all that was left were the boxes which contained Shannon's and Kelly's possessions. It didn't feel right to Tony to have them placed alongside the other, more mundane items, but he still wasn't sure what to do with them. Since he was starving, he decided to go in and order a pizza, while he tried to come up with a solution, knowing he had till tomorrow evening to solve the problem.

The next morning, Tony was at the do-it-yourself center by 8:00 a.m. Having drawn a blank as to what to do with the items, he hoped the store would provide him with inspiration. He knew he wanted something that would keep them safe, but which had a door so that Gibbs didn't have to look at them, except when he chose to do so. Finally Tony found the right thing, a small red fireproof cabinet, just the right size for the plastic boxes Tony had transferred the items into. The cabinet was incredibly expensive, well over two thousand dollars, but Tony knew it was the perfect solution, and not something Gibbs would probably spend money on, if left to his own devises. A salesman helped Tony get it to the car, and tipped sideways into the trunk. As Tony once again tied down the lid, he was glad for the dolly he had unearthed on Thursday; he'd need it to get the cabinet into the garage.

By 4:00 p.m. the garage was done and Tony had a pan of lasagna in the oven, planning to surprise Gibbs with a home cooked meal when he returned. Knowing that Gibbs wasn't due back for another hour, he wandered down to the basement, and curled up in the rocker, pleased with himself, and wanting to bask in the glow of a job well done. As it had the night before, the gentle rocking motion, aided by Tony's own exhaustion, eased him into sleep.

When Gibbs walked through the front door at 5:15, the first thing he noticed was the smell of tomato sauce and rich cheese that had wafted through the house. He smiled, knowing it meant that Tony had cooked dinner. Setting his bag down by the door, he headed for the kitchen, expecting to find Tony there. There was no sign of him, but Gibbs was startled to see the door which led to the garage ajar. Walking over to it, intending to shut it, he stopped, his arm mid reach, when he looked at the interior of the garage. Where once there had been a jumbled mess, he now saw the concrete floor. Stepping down into the space, he looked around, stunned by what he saw. Two enormous storage cabinets sat on the back wall, facing the sliding garage door. Walking over to them, he opened the doors. Neatly sorted and labeled, were clear plastic storage containers of various sizes, holding what had once been strewn around the space. Shutting the doors, he looked further. Hooks had been installed in the walls, and ladders, shovels and other tools hung in a neat row, elevated and safe from the potential of water damage. On the wall next to the door leading into the house, sat a red metal cabinet. When Gibbs opened the door to it, he made a small choking sound. The shelves were once again filled with plastic tubs. The first box was labeled 'Precious Memories – children's books'. Next to it sat another, its label identifying it as 'Precious Memories – toys and stuffed animals;' and so it went, each tub lovingly labeled with 'Precious Memories,' followed by a description of the contents. Gibbs just stood and looked, unable to move, his breath catching in his throat and his eyes filling with unshed tears. Finally, pulling out the smallest box, labeled 'Precious Memories – letters to home', he opened the lid, and drew forth the bundle of letters he found enclosed. Pressing the bundle to his lips, he placed a small kiss on the top letter, and then replaced it in the box, which he slid back into its spot in the cabinet. Letting the cabinets door slide shut, he walked back into the kitchen and looked around. There was light spilling from the edges of the door leading to the basement, and Gibbs suddenly knew where to find Tony.

When he got to the bottom of the stairs, he once again froze. There sat Tony, little smudges of dirt on his face, curled up sound asleep, in a chair Gibbs hadn't seen for close to twenty years. Memories washed over him. Images of him and Shannon, picking out the chair, Shannon's belly swollen with their child. Pictures of Shannon rocking Kelly in their bedroom, as she breast fed her in the still of the night. The memory of the night he had spent sitting in the chair, holding Shannon on his lap as she cried, consumed by grief over the loss of her best friend who had been killed in a car accident, quickly replaced by another more pleasant memory of him, once again holding Shannon, as they gently kissed, having just returned from dinner, having celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary. Looking at Tony, he suddenly realized that it seemed so right, that he should be the one to uncover the chair and find a second life for it. Kneeling in front of the chair, he reached out and softly ran his hand across Tony's face, wiping away the dirt that dotted his nose and cheeks.

Tony's eyes opened at Gibbs' touch, and his face lit with the luminescence of his smile.

"Thank you," Gibbs said hoarsely.

"You saw the garage already?" Tony asked, disappointment lacing the question. "I wanted to be the one to show it to you."

"I was actually glad to find it by myself," Gibbs said, having difficulty speaking. "Thank you for the Precious Memories," he said, as he drew Tony close, capturing his lips in a fierce kiss. As the front of the chair pressed into his thighs, it occurred to him that together, he and Tony would make new memories for the chair, memories which would not replace the old ones, but which would take up residence side by side with the past, forging a link between the two, and testifying to the bonds of love.


End file.
